"Philosophy" as the beginning of spiritual science. The spiritual bodies and the Great Birth. When the individual assumes that physical realities are "fixed points". When the individual's concept of God does not appear on the basis of "fixed points". The illusory concept of God as the way to the real Godhead
238. But life continues perpetually.
After the individual has come to the limit of the physical or material plane of existence and has experienced that realities both genuine and steadfast are not to be found there, he begins to look to non-physical realities for support, and his knowledge or science now comes under what we call
"philosophy".
Philosophy is actually the beginning of spiritual science.
But before philosophy can become pure wisdom or spiritual science it is necessary that the spiritual bodies develop to such perfection that the non-physical realities with which those individual's occupy themselves are not experienced merely as thoughts, ideas and theories but as actual facts.
But the spiritual bodies only reach such completion when their capacity of sensing reaches love energy.
When the individual's spiritual bodies reach that capacity he experiences the "Great Birth", and the cosmic experience or thought process "from above" begins to be fundamental.
The individual is thereby enwrapped in a transfigured existence.
And here the physical world begins to be for him a stage now completed, because his experiences are met with
from genuine "fixed points" and not from movements.
This means that his experience of life rests upon eternal realities and thereby becomes the expression of life's absolute value, which is the same as "Eternal Truth".
While previously the individual only experienced changeable values, he now experiences unchangeable values.
In order to understand this, one has to remember
that when the individual accepts material movements such as material realities and physical details as genuine "fixed points" he is living in an illusion.
When he sees, for example, a house, a tree, a mountain, a rock, or a star and believes that every one of these realities constitutes a "fixed point", a true analysis or an eternal fact, so - as we have described earlier - he will still be living in the physical world.
He cannot see behind these realities and realise that they constitute only certain forms of vibration or movement, and that the yardstick by which they have been measured has been his own movements.
He did not experience that the apparently true realities were only an expression of contrast between his own movements and the movements of his surroundings and that the yardstick is constantly subject to change.
It is the same with the individual's concept of God.
As long as it is expressed in the form of a picture, for instance a being who sits on a golden throne directing the universe, then that individual is the victim of an illusion.
He is worshipping a changeable instead of an unchangeable fact, a temporal instead of an eternal reality.
Such an idea about God will thus be expressing a material factor, a created or thought-out image, which has nothing to do with the true cosmic and unchangeable analysis of the Godhead.
That image had only come about on the basis of certain specific movements in relation to the worshipper's own movements and should thus change correspondingly as these characteristics change.
And the more one attaches to that image of the Godhead characteristics of a certain definite kind and equips it with the so-called "good" qualities and denies it the so-called "bad" qualities, the more artificial becomes such a concept of God.
Such a "Godhead" becomes only an accumulation of separated movements.
But an accumulation of separated movements can in no way whatsoever be a correct or satisfying analysis of a "living being".
That kind of "Godhead" is really not a living being at all but a dead being - not a God but an idol.
But here we must hasten to add that to have an idol is the same as to have a commencement of the recognition of the true God.
It is the embryonic state of the true concept of God.
And that individual who is able to sense or grasp the concept of God only in this condition has no reason to be anxious, because an embryonic state will always be the way to a more real state and through that previous concept of God he will be guided to the true concept of God - the real living Godhead.